Xbox 720

According to a job listing popping up this week, "in the next 18 months" there's going to be a whole new batch of Microsoft products including not least of all a whole new Xbox. This job listing says quite specifically what the new hire will be working on, it including no less than a year and a half of efforts into essentially a whole new collection of interfaces for Microsoft hardware. But here's the thing: this doesn't necessarily mean there's an Xbox 720 coming in under 2 years, it may only mean that there's going to be a software update.

A Microsoft Durango developer kit reportedly emerged on a developper forum over the weekend, commanding a sale price of $10,000. The kit, which is said to feature an Intel CPU, NVIDIA GPU, and “more than 8GB of memory”, is used for Xbox 720 development. The fact that the kit looked like a plain black PC tower running a regular debug launcher led many to believe it was nothing more than a hoax, but Digital Foundry decided to reach out to several sources and developers, discovering that the kit was in fact the real deal.

When Microsoft announced the Kinect, the motion-gaming peripheral that requires no controller to work, it was celebrated by the mainstream and hardcore alike for its unique functionality.

Since then, Microsoft has delivered enhanced features, but for the vast majority of gamers, it has become a bit of a novelty. Sure, it’s a neat way to command the Xbox or shout some orders in games, but beyond that, it delivers little value to the average person trying to sit down, relax, and enjoy a title.

While a lot of people want to throw the PS4 in with the rumors and speculation about Microsoft's new Xbox, Sony isn't having any of that. Such is demonstrated with the rumored "super slim" PS3 that's on the way. It will reportedly have Bluetooth and 802.11b/g, and will come in models all the way up to 500 GB. It's also believed to be priced at around $150.

The next console generation is technically getting underway with this year's release of the Wii U, but to many gamers, the next generation won't truly arrive until the next Xbox and PlayStation are introduced as well. When that will happen is really anyone's guess - we've heard plenty of rumors, but Microsoft and Sony are both remaining tight-lipped on their plans for new consoles. Today, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot told Gamasutra that his company is ready for the next generation to kick off, saying that a new lineup of consoles would do a lot to spark innovation within the industry.

The idea of a console that could be upgrade over time isn’t new, but Microsoft has filed a patent for that very concept. The company applied for the patent back in December 2010, which details a console that could “satisfy quality of service guarantees for multimedia applications such as game applications while allowing platform resources, hardware resources in particular, to scale up or down over time.”

Would you buy an Xbox 720 if it meant you had to sign a contract with a cable company? Yeah, you read that correctly. Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter seems to believe that the next iteration of Microsoft's Xbox will act as both a video game console and a cable box - like, with a legitimate, actual physical service connection meaning you won't need to have a standalone cable box.

This week a collection of domain names have been transferred from Chinese cybersquatter (not as dirty as it sounds) to Microsoft, one of them being not Xbox720, but Xbox8.com. This domain name could very well represent the 8th Xbox in the very distant future, but more likely it's got to do with either the infinity sign or the imminent release of Windows 8 - made ready and willing to work with the Xbox in a massive amount of ways, most of them involving content sharing.

Game development expert John Carmack believes that the next generation of video game consoles won't be anything to write home about. Carmack said in a recent interview that he was admittedly optimistic about the increased rendering power of an Xbox 720 or PS4, but beyond that he has no grand vision of what to expect. We may be hitting the point of diminishing returns.

For those of you that saw the 56-page document showing the plans for the Xbox 720 this past week, you'll be glad that you downloaded it: sites across the web, not just sites like Scribd that'd originally had the document up in the cloud. The takedown order has been pushed by none other than Legal firm called Covington & Burling LLP, the same Microsoft-representing firm that ordered the takedown on other sites earlier this week. Today this order has been expanded to sites such as IHNED as well as Dropbox - the latter having the file hosted on one of its soon-to-be-phased-out public folders anyway.